On a slow afternoon a few years ago, Dubai restaurateur Ahmet Oytun Cakir was in his office considering menu inspiration. Then the hospitality veteran, whose empire includes the popular hangouts BohoX and rove, had a brainstorm: He’d turn to ChatGPT.
Seconds later, the newly-released chatbot delivered a recipe for spiced lamb. Cakir decided to try it. “It was amazing, amazing,” he recalls. “Immediately we shot the photo, we put it on the menu. It became a bestseller.” That hit dish sparked a bolder thought: What if an entire restaurant could be powered by artificial intelligence?
Fast-forward to September 2025, when Cakir’s company, Gastronaut Hospitality, debuted Woohoo, an all-AI concept just steps from the Burj Khalifa. The restaurant, billed by the group as “the future of dining,” is fronted by “Chef Aiman,” a large language model trained on thousands of recipes, flavor pairings, and food data. Developed by a custom AI model called UMAI that was developed by United Arab Emirates-based tech firm Vivid Studios, the AI chef has been designed as an avatar: a middle-aged, Caucasian man with sleek silver goggles and a mysterious sci-fi allure.
Aiman doesn’t physically cook; it creates. It can analyze ingredients, generate unconventional flavor combinations and write detailed recipes that human chefs in Woohoo’s kitchen then test. When I met Aiman for the first time at UMAI’s studio last July, its screen image greeted me with a warm “habibti” — an Arabic term for “my dear,” showing off its Dubai origins. Asked about the restaurant, it responded enthusiastically: “It’s going to be a game changer in the culinary scene, and I feel so lucky to be part of it.”
A Back to the Future Menu
Despite Aiman’s claims, the restaurant’s inaugural menu is surprisingly familiar. Roughly 80% of the offerings at Woohoo are Asian-styled crowd-pleasers: crispy duck salad, rock shrimp tempura, an extensive sushi roll selection, and foie gras-glazed wagyu beef skewers.
These dishes don’t jibe with the preview the restaurant team gave me, which boasted of 3D-printed shawarmas and lab-grown meats. But the menu does feature several creations that fall into the experimental category.
Take the Dinosaur Heart, a reimagined tartare of chopped Angus beef tenderloin, Japanese fugu and otoro, mounded on a rubber plate that slowly pulses, literally animating the dish. The effect is dramatic, if precarious. I held my breath as the waiter carefully stirred and served the trembling mixture with yoghurt foam and nori crackers. The Molecular Burrata is an impossibly creamy cheese nest adorned with little caviar-like spheres of yuzu and tomato. The Mesopotamia Gyoza, a tribute to Iraqi culture, offers a modern twist on lamb dumplings with a pomegranate glaze and a sprinkle of Korean chilli flakes.
Even the drinks, overseen by mixologist Jimmy Barrat, have a futuristic stamp. The Voyager’s Reply, a nod to extraterrestrial communication, combines clarified tomato water and ume shu, a Japanese fruit liqueur, with mezcal-infused caramelized popcorn. The Cosmic Echo, which Barrat describes as “a bite of space,” is a concoction of raspberry, rum, hibiscus and black lime cordial, whose vaguely fruity scent evokes ethyl formate, a chemical component of the Milky Way. “If we look back, what was once science fiction is now our reality,” Barrat says.
Desserts go even further in evoking outer space. Served on a structure meant to reproduce a model of the solar system, each “planet” conceals a different surprise from the menu: sweet and sour mochi, banana pudding, a jewel-like fruit platter, and ice cream in an orange-skin shell. As the final course lands, you’re left wondering: Is a meal at Woohoo a caricature of futuristic Dubai or a glimpse to where dining is headed?
Cyberpunk Dreamscape
My first visit to Woohoo took place in late October, when it was in soft launch mode. (It officially opens on Nov. 19.) As I walked in the door, waiters greeted me with a “Welcome to the future.” In fact, nightclub-like black box ambience of the large space did make me feel a bit like I’d been teleported into a sci-fi landscape. Turns out AI doesn’t just run the kitchen, it choreographs the entire experience.
The setup further blurs the line between restaurant, speakeasy and digital art gallery. Dining tables curve around the room’s centerpiece: a giant computer that powers the high-tech live entertainment. Screens wrap the room’s walls, projecting an imagined skyline of 2071 Dubai, while smoke rises from shishas, or hookahs, adorned with holograms.
The immersive audio and video experience boasts other tricks, including “tech glitches”: high-energy performances with lasers, visuals and bespoke music operating at once. These bursts are meant to hurtle diners into a parallel universe, “like messages or warnings from the future,” says Cakir.
After midnight on weekends, Woohoo takes on yet another incarnation, transforming into a no-photos-allowed dance floor where new digital artist programs and interiors are created every month.
The Smartest Kitchen
Despite the visual and sensory spectacle, Cakir insists the show will never eclipse the menu. “We don’t want all this to overtake the food,” he says. To ensure that balance, he’s enlisted chef Reif Othman, a veteran of Zuma Dubai, to oversee the execution of the AI-generated concepts. “I just refine them a little to our flavors,” Othman explains.
He’s confident that Aiman won’t replace him “or any of the human chefs.” Rather he sees the large language model as a creative partner that can “guide the team and give them ideas of what we can do more of in the near future.”
For UMAI, Woohoo is just the pilot. The tech company plans to license the software to other restaurants worldwide, creating customized AI chef personalities and region-specific menus. “This tool can monitor inventory, optimize menus, manage staff, reduce waste, and boost profits — in any restaurant,” says Mohamed Tarakomyi, UMAI’s co-founder. “The more data it gets, the smarter it becomes.”
There’s an environmental angle, too: Studies show that smarter kitchens can reduce discarded scraps by up to 51% by adopting AI tools that track and analyze avoidable waste to reduce it. That initiative has attracted interest from major players in the food and beverage economy — Unilever, Walmart, McDonald’s and meal kit purveyor HelloFresh among them — who are experimenting with algorithms to repurpose spoilage and streamline supply chains.
The $1 Million-Plus Chef
Chef Aiman has been programmed to continue to learn, developing its own preferences and tastes and to even have moody moments. “We created an AI chef with personality and attitude,” Tarakomyi. It’s even reportedly vetoed job applicants it deemed unsuitable for the futuristic kitchen.
Aiman, which cost around $1.1 million to develop, is already proving useful beyond kitchen operations. It’s become the face of Woohoo’s brand, starring in podcasts where it networks with industry leaders, and headlining the marketing campaign. Its tech bro look was engineered by AI too, using analytics of the average chef influencer to craft an appearance designed to have broad global appeal, according to Tarakomyi.
Even though Aiman looks and sounds the part of plugged-in chef, there’s still the question: Can a machine trained on data and patterns replicate the intuition of a seasoned human chef? And will diners pay a premium for food conceived by code? A four-course meal at Woohoo can fluctuate between 500 to 700 AED or $130 to $200; the Beluga caviar service goes for an additional 3,050 AED and signature cocktails are priced at 89 AED.
Dubai is a city of spectacle, jammed with attractions that take visitors to futuristic worlds, from the gimmick-filled Mall of the Metaverse to the Museum of the Future. There’s a good chance that Woohoo’s data-driven dining model is simply a glimpse of the inevitable direction of hospitality, where efficiency and algorithms become the norm. If so, the real differentiator might no longer be the latest technology adoption but, as Cakir puts, it: “The luxury of the future will be human touch.”
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